1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Bice of Verge Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some examples from your investment portfolio. What have you invested in? What are the highlights of your portfolio?

As you describe them, what state did you encounter these companies in? What attracted you to them?

Bill Bice: Let’s start with Intellicyt that I just mentioned. It was a pre-revenue, pre-LLC company. My partner found the technology at University of New Mexico and helped match that with an entrepreneur who had experience in this market.

He moved to New Mexico to leverage that opportunity. They took a core technology that’s well known and they made it a couple of orders magnitude faster, which meant you can apply it to a whole bunch of new things including personalized medicine.

MD Anderson uses Intellicyt in order to find the right drug cocktail combination to give to somebody. That was the classic build from the ground up and invest every step of the way. Frankly, that’s a really long road. We were in that company for 10 years.

It fully illustrates the opportunity and challenges of being in Albuquerque. It’s the largest VC-backed exit that we have to date. It was a good exit for us. At the same time, it was a $90 million exit. That’s the largest one we’ve had so far.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s not a problem. I’m sure you know from my writings that I don’t consider that as a problem at all. For an up-and-coming region, those kinds of exits are fantastic. If you have a few of those exits, that’s just exactly what the doctor ordered.

Bill Bice: They are fantastic. You recently talked about the ecosystem in Salt Lake City in Provo. It’s completely acceptable to be a Valley VC firm and invest in a Provo, Utah company. You’re not going to get thrown out of your window.

It’s completely acceptable to invest there because there have been enough exits of a large enough size. The vast majority of acquisitions are $10 million to $50 million. The VC industry should really be built around those kinds of companies as opposed to everything as a unicorn.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve spoken, ad nauseam, about this topic.

Bill Bice: You need to because it needs to break through.

Sramana Mitra: Nobody is listening unless you hit the nail on the head over and over again.

Bill Bice: I completely agree with you. That’s how we get Silicon Valley style innovation spread across the rest of the world. It’s by focusing on those $10 million to $50 million exits.

Sramana Mitra: You want to talk about one of your information technology investments?

Bill Bice: Certainly. The company that I’m running right now is a great example of that. Boomtime came from my experience of all the companies that I’ve built and invested in. I was really getting frustrated with getting great marketing for those companies.

Go-to-market is really where the failure is. A company doesn’t achieve its potential because it’s not able to consistently and effectively execute on go-to-market. We are working really hard to put scale and efficiency and marketing a reproducible process.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Bice of Verge Fund
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